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Is Wix eCommerce for you?

Wix has come a long way and having Wix eCommerce now competing with the likes of Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce it is time to size up its capabilities. We are talking about a Shopping Cart hosted on the cloud space like Shopify with the ability to process credit cards, with features like Social Media integration, Search engine Optimization, and Apps like live chat. Every small business and business owner can benefit from an online shop, using best practices from the app store will help the co
Is Wix eCommerce for you?

Wix has come a long way and having Wix eCommerce now competing with the likes of Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce it is time to size up its capabilities. We are talking about a Shopping Cart hosted on the cloud space like Shopify with the ability to process credit cards, with features like Social Media integration, Search engine Optimization, and Apps like live chat.


Every small business and business owner can benefit from an online shop, using best practices from the app store will help the conversion rate. All kinds of products from physical to digital products can be listed, managed, and tracked with payment options at your disposal. Promotional social media marketing tools, email marketing as well as additional professional tools and services are available.


Here we will cover 16 areas to which it could be compared to its rival Shopify, but we will focus on the Wix eCommerce features to see how they apply and may create a benefit to give it a try.


Ease of Use of the platform


While at the start of Shopify's amazing journey, ease of use was a key focus, however, with merchants wanting more capabilities and features, Wix eCommerce would position itself a few years back where ease of use has an advantage over Shopify.


Wix uses blocks to build out the website, which makes changing a Wix Theme a lot easier to change the look and feel of a page, allowing your creativity to flourish and have the exact look and feel you are looking for. With the user experience in mind, the Wix eCommerce platform makes your build-out easier, and faster to get the result you are looking for in your website design.


Product pages are easy to set up, with the usual import tools you can expect from a shopping cart platform. Selling online has never been easier when it comes to a high-end cloud-based platform with relative ease to connect to your credit card issuers.


Wix Themes


Given that the maturity of Shopify is much further ahead, their availability of Shopify Themes is extraordinary in varied UI designs and user experience (UX). The additional variation does however hinder on the complexity side, since you must know what you are looking for, and find it. On the WIX side, there are 60 good Wix eCommerce themes that are free, however, when it comes to your product page, to the cart, and then to offer your credit card into the one-page checkout, your options will feel limited. Wix eCommerce has a bit of catching up in this department when it comes to providing the depth of varied themes, and have more eCommerce-focused themes to be available.


Product Page


The advantage of innovating after a competing successful platform is that you can improve on several areas and call it better. Here is where WIX eCommerce shines, it has better features than that of Shopify, and it is also made easier to manage. Advantages in the number of variants (3 vs 6), product carousel, and product images zoom are some of the key features you will see by default in Wix eCommerce.


Card Payments and Channels


If you are looking for an online store focused on payment and POS, Wix eCommerce will do fine. Shopify has had more time to integrate with additional social media platforms like Etsy, Pinterest, and Amazon where both will cover Facebook and Instagram. When it comes to payment gateways, Wix will cover the likes of Stripe and several others that have integrated with its platform - however, Shopify has a larger library of processors integrated.

When it comes to popular social media channels, Wix is slightly limited such as Facebook Messenger, which reflects a Wix weakness in website chat space, however, adding a buy button onto an affiliate website is not possible on Wix just yet. Like previously mentioned, Wix is growing but has not caught up with its competitor.


Carrier Integration and Tax Settings


While both have a good set of carriers integrated into their platforms, much like payment methods and channels, Wix's maturity is slightly lagging - but not by much when it comes to capabilities. The main item to note is the lack of integration with FedEx's and UPS Real-Time Shipping where USPS is covered by both. However, when it comes to setting up taxes, the platforms have equal capabilities and allows your store to consider regions, local and import duties.


Multilingual and Multi-currency


Probably the weakest point of any Cloud-based eCommerce is diversifying your online store and have the shopping cart handle different languages and currencies. While payment gateways do this well, it is both the cloud-based architecture and Themes that make this difficult. Shopify gets around this with Shopify Plus and it gives you up to 10 stores to have with each their own theme, payment gateway, and language. Wix is at the same structural disadvantage - you need a store per language/currency.


Search Engine Optimization and Speed


From Meta Description, Title Tags and the ability to do link building Wix is fully capable on all fronts. Dealing with redirects, both have their methods to do 301 redirects. Internal links are encouraged especially for blogs and work well in both systems. Part of SEO is site speed, where Shopify shines above Wix in this department where Wix can be fast but will at times have slow periods out of the blue. Speed is important to customer satisfaction in the purchase experience and does affect conversion. Some speed issues are attributed to being able to themes that are not WC3 errors and JavaScript compression.


Reaching Platform Support


Where both offer various tools to assist you to adopt their solution, Wix has limited channels to be reached and doesn't offer the same depth of community knowledge to be shared. Again, a maturing platform and it is constantly being improved.


Price and Value


You will find that Wix is generally cheaper than Shopify, which is expected given that they are both in direct competition with one another. Wix starts at $13 while Shopify starts at $26. As you go through the plans offered, Wix will show itself to be of better value for a close to the equivalent feature set. With Shopify, you can pre-pay an annual fee and save some of the monthly - which is an option.


Conclusion


When looking for a solid eCommerce platform, many basic questions come to mind. Do you want to own your own infrastructures such as Magento or WordPress/WooCommerce or go for an easier maintenance solution such as a cloud-based system such as Shopify and Wix eCommerce? Here we covered the basics when it comes to the capabilities of Wix eCommerce and in comparison to its main competitor. We didn't cover the development of Custom Apps or even dig into the plethora of Apps available on each platform since that's constantly being added to. In the end, it comes down to your business goals, business model, and the type of reach you are looking to achieve (global vs. local). If you would like to discuss further with eCommerce experts - feel free to reach out to us at wish@thegenielab.com - we would love to help!


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